Nowhere Bound

A night of Schubert and Beckett.

Schubert’s “Winterreise,” twenty-four numbingly beautiful songs on texts by Wilhelm Müller, opens with the lines “I came here as a stranger / A stranger I depart.” The words seem to be a typical specimen of Romantic angst, but Schubert transforms them into a kind of philosophical motto. The first song, “Gute Nacht,” is in walking rhythm, with accents implying a determined stride. It is in D minor, the iconic tragic key of Mozart and Beethoven, although the steady pace suggests that tragedy has been internalized, made into a way of life. And the principal melody, which moves in steeply descending phrases, is positioned with extraordinary precision between ancient balladry and the questing spirit of the art-song tradition, which Schubert more or less invented. The absence of conventional sentiment is what frees the song from its Romantic context and takes it into the eternal present. The contentment of a solitary winter stroll mixes with a deeper, more abstract dread—that of a man proceeding through life in a disaffected trance, counting off the steps toward death. The musicologist Karol Berger has claimed, boldly but plausibly, that Schubert’s cycle is “our civilization’s greatest poem of existential estrangement and isolation.”

Berger mentions Samuel Beckett in the same breath as Schubert, and he is hardly the only commentator to do so. “Winterreise,” or “Winter Journey,” unfolds like a Beckett play, in a landscape as vivid as it is vague. A man is walking out of a village on a snowy road, lamenting that his beloved has spurned him. He watches a weathervane spin, feels tears freezing on his face, looks for the woman’s footprints, stands by a linden tree where he once carved words of love. A river flowing beneath a crust of ice reminds him of a heart beating inside a cold body. His soles burn. A will-o’-the-wisp leads him astray. He sleeps in a charcoal burner’s cottage. He dreams of spring and wakes to cawing ravens. Events grow stranger: the blowing of a post horn makes him hope for a letter, even though he is of no address; a crow flies around his head; a fluttering leaf appears to hold his fate in the balance. He returns to the village, where dogs bark and rattle their chains. Then he returns to the road, avoiding all signposts to familiar places. He comes upon a graveyard, which he pictures as an inn of eternal rest. There is no vacancy. He walks on. A burst of courage: “Lamenting is for fools.” Mock suns in the sky. Longing for night. Finally, in “Der Leiermann,” he meets an ancient organ-grinder, who plays a tune for no one and “lets it all go on as it will.”

Beckett himself recognized the kinship. A music lover and an amateur pianist, he felt closer to Schubert than to any other composer. Beckett’s radio play “All That Fall” begins with the strains of “Death and the Maiden.” The teleplay “Nacht und Träume” employs a fragment of the Schubert song. The writer once reported to his cousin John Beckett that he was spending his days listening alone to “Winterreise”—“shivering through the grim journey again.” His final play, “What Where,” ends with an allusion to the cycle:

It is winter.

Without journey.

Time passes.

That is all.

Make sense who may.

I switch off.

Those lines are almost a précis of the music itself. On some level, there is no journey, no movement; the cycle keeps circling back to the same textures and motifs. “Wegweiser,” the song of the signposts, echoes the ambling tempo, the repeating chords, and the obstinate one-note patterns of “Gute Nacht.” The wanderer always finds himself on the same road out of the same village, nowhere bound.

The British director Katie Mitchell, in collaboration with the tenor Mark Padmore, the actor Stephen Dillane, and the pianist Andrew West, had the excellent idea of creating a theatre piece around Beckett’s intense relationship with “Winterreise,” weaving his poetry and prose into a live performance of the cycle. The resulting production, titled “One Evening,” had its première in Aldeburgh, England, last May, and came to John Jay College in early December, under the auspices of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series. A few days before, Great Performers, which has been experimenting inventively with concert formats in recent years, presented another Mitchell piece, “Four Quartets,” in which a recitation of the T. S. Eliot poems adjoins a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 132.

“One Evening” was not an evening for Schubert purists. First of all, we didn’t hear “Winterreise” complete; two songs were cut, and others were heard in fragmentary form or merely spoken, with Beckett and Schubert intermittently overlapping. A constant stream of electronic and handmade noise, in the style of an old-school radio play, underpinned the music. Dillane, who assumed the role of the journeying protagonist, breathed heavily into a microphone and mimicked the sound of feet crunching on snow. Padmore, even when he was singing, busied himself turning a wind machine, rustling twigs, pouring water from a jug into a cup, and so on. West was also given various sound-effect assignments. At times, it seemed as though “Winterreise” were being played alongside John Cage’s “Water Walk” or some other exercise in conceptual composition.

I found it an alternately fascinating and frustrating spectacle. For long stretches, there was too much going on—especially given that Schubert and Beckett were both masters of the minimal, telling gesture. (Beckett, in his letters, praised the composer’s “rigid economy of application.”) Whenever I felt ready to immerse myself in either artist’s threadbare world, the multitasking interrupted my reverie. Padmore is one of the most distinctive lyric singers on the contemporary scene—he has recorded a starkly lovely “Winterreise,” with Paul Lewis at the piano, for the Harmonia Mundi label—but his sweet-toned, nuanced tenor often seemed lost in the melee, even with the use of amplification. Perhaps the way to do it would have been to present the piece twice, the second time in near- or total darkness.

All the same, Mitchell’s intricate vision had me thinking about “Winterreise” for days. She brought home the startling specificity of Schubert’s writing—his evocation of rattling dog chains in the slow trills of “Im Dorfe,” or of ice cracking over the river’s flow in the quick detached chords of “Auf dem Flusse.” The strangeness of Schubert’s dreamscape was heightened at every turn. And it was a relief to be released from the routine of the lieder recital, where the houselights usually remain at a level suitable for the keynote address at a medical convention. To watch an experienced director training her sights on concert culture is to realize how bland, and fundamentally anti-musical, the standard format has become. In “Four Quartets,” following Dillane’s bravura recitation of the Eliot poems, the Miró Quartet played the Beethoven under a hanging lamp, the musicians facing each other rather than the audience. It was a furiously committed interpretation, and the staging kept you riveted on the music.

In the end, the focus of “One Evening” was less on Schubert than on Beckett, and the production worked best as an oblique dramatization of those occasions when the writer absorbed “Winterreise” in isolation. In the final minutes, Beckett took over: Dillane intoned, in an icily lyrical voice, the late-period prose fragment that gave the event its name. “He was found lying on the ground,” the piece begins. “No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. An old woman found him. To put it vaguely. . . . He wore a greatcoat in spite of the time of year.” The audience automatically pictured the wanderer of “Winterreise,” his body apparently discovered in the spring thaw. Droning from an upright piano was the open fifth that sounds through “Der Leiermann.” The conventional interpretation is to see the organ-grinder as a personification of death, leading the traveller to his grave, but here the song conjured up an uncanny scene of Schubert and Beckett meeting face to face, in the place where beauty and bleakness converge. ♦

Alex Ross, the magazine’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.”